Department Overview:
The North Carolina Translational and Clinical Sciences (NC TraCS) Institute is one of more than 50
medical research institutions, funded through the Clinical and Translational Science Awards (CTSA)
program at the National Institutes of Health, working together as a national consortium to improve the
way biomedical research is conducted across the country (https://tracs.unc.edu/).
TraCS Informatics and Data Science (IDSci) supports investigators in the areas of clinical informatics and
research data management, along with building and maintaining the TraCS internal and external
websites. A core area of our work centers on the Carolina Data Warehouse for Health (CDW-H), a
repository for clinical, research, and administrative data from the UNC Health Care System. Researchers
work with us to request datasets from the CDW-H, which they use to recruit patients or conduct
secondary data analyses. We also create and maintain tools to support researchers including
i2b2@UNC, REDCap, EMERSE (a clinical note searching tool), and CLARK (a user-friendly natural
language processing tool for clinical notes). Our web development team manages the TraCS website,
where researchers can make requests of all of TraCS services, and Join the Conquest, a project devoted
to connecting potential participants with research projects.
Position Description:
We seek a highly motivated and detail-oriented graduate student to join our team. The intern will
support the core work of TraCS Informatics.
Projects include:
- End-user documentation – Craft documentation about TraCS Informatics tools (e.g., CLARK,
EMERSE) for end-users - Workflow and Standard Operation Procedures (SOP) – Consult with the informatics team and
review existing documentation to produce up-to-date and easy-to-use workflows and SOPs - Quality Assurance – Conduct QA activities for CDWH data requests and user-created i2b2
queries. This activity will include chart abstraction and i2b2 querying.
The project plan for the internship will be finalized when a candidate is selected, based on the
candidate’s qualifications and our active projects.
This position will be ideal for a student enrolled in an informatics, health-related, or computer science
program who would like to learn the “ins-and-outs” of clinical research informatics. Applicants should
expect to gain a foundational knowledge on the use, management, analysis and protection of protected
health information for research purposes and will gain experience with informatics tools for structured
and unstructured clinical data.
Anticipated Start Date – Monday, January 7, 2019
Anticipated End Date – Friday, May 3, 2019
Time Commitment – 20 hours/week
Pay Rate – $17.50 per hour
Work Location – NC TraCS Institute office in Brinkhous-Bullitt, 2nd Floor, telework is not permitted
If desired and permitted by the home department, we are open to the candidate using this position as a
program-required internship.
Qualifications:
1. Enrollment in a graduate program at UNC – Chapel Hill for spring 2019. This should be reflected
in the submitted CV/resume.
2. Required skills include:
- Excellent written and oral interpersonal communication skills
- Ability to work independently, while also collaborating with a team, in order to achieve
project goals - Strong attention to detail
3. Preferred skills include:
- Experience writing workflows/SOPs and end-user documentation
- Understanding of regulatory and privacy rules for working with protected health
information - Experience using i2b2, Epic, healthcare data
- Demonstrable knowledge of SQL
To Apply:
The application deadline is November 28, 2018.
Please send the following items to Kellie Walters, Sr. Informatics Project Manager at NC TraCS
(kellie_walters@med.unc.edu), with the subject line: “TraCS Intern Spring 2019 – Application.”
- Resume or CV
- Cover letter describing how your qualifications make you a fit for this position
- A brief (1-3 page) writing sample, demonstrating proficiency in technical writing. This can be
an excerpt from a paper from your graduate program, an assignment from a past or current
professional position, or another type of sample along those lines.